fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had
ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,--maybe a mighty
hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls
of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the
goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon. Then, seeking out some
secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the
precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a
mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus
surely passing away. Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he,
had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to
anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret
places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the
glorious resurrection of the Renaissance. A resurrection, however, by no
means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence;
for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and
the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant
had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful
image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for
mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with
"the new learning," chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction.
Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again,
the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when
Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as
Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own
paintings into the flames--to the lugubrious rejoicings of the
sanctimonious Piagnoni--as Savonarola's followers were called;
predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later,
were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed
psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First